From the report in newspapers in Britain for example the Telegraph, France does not agree with the flooding of English words into her national language and it becomes the responsibility of the Academie Francaise to protect French from the threat of English.
Academie Francaise acts as an official authority on the French language where it is charged in the publication of an official dictionary whose first edition was published in 1964 (Samuel, 2011). The ninth edition was started in 1992 and its third tome ending in the letter “Q” will be released in the end of 2011 (Samuel, 2011). The Academie was discontinued in 1793 during the French Revolution but later, it was restored by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1803 (Samuel, 2011).
One of the aims of the Academie whose members include of writers, linguists, historians, and philosophers of 40 people is to protect French from foreign invasions, notably from the “Anglo-Saxon” (Samuel, 2011). To that end, it comes up with French equivalents to pesky Anglicism which slips into French such as the changing of email into courier (Samuel, 2011).
France introduced the Toubon law in 1994 enforcing the obligation on official government documents and publications to be published in French (GlobalVision, 1994). It also demands the advertisements, state-funded schools, and workplaces to use French as the main medium (GlobalVision, 1994). It means, for example, that all English words on billboards come with a French translation in a footnote.
Each French ministry has its own commission of terminology and neologisms. Their job is to track down English terms and offer French alternatives (Samuel, 2011). They send their proposals to the Academie, which will debate the new terms and rubber stamps them (Samuel, 2011).
It means that all the civil servants are urged to use them once they are published in the statues book. However, its rulings are only advisory and not binding either on the public or government sector (Samuel, 2011). About 300 such official French terms appear every year but not all catch on (Samuel, 2011). For example, the French term “prix hypotecaire a risqué” is not often heard in place of “subprime” (Samuel, 2011).
